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VMware has announced it is to sell its cloud offering based on the software-driven data centre (SDDC), vCloud Air, to French cloud computing provider OVH in what was described as ‘the next step in vCloud Air’s evolution’.<\/p>\n
OVH, with more than one million customers and 260,000 servers deployed, is a long-time VMware partner. The company was cited by analyst firm Cloud Spectator in February<\/a> as the second-best infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider taking its ranking criteria of price-performance value and looking specifically at the North American market. OVH announced its US plans in March, with data centres planned for Oregon and Virginia, alongside a third in Canada.<\/p>\n VMware will transition vCloud Air’s US and European data centres and customer operations to OVH, with the rebranded service being known as vCloud Air Powered by OVH going forward.<\/p>\n “We have enjoyed a long and successful partnership with OVH and view this acquisition as an extension of our partnership and a positive for our customers and partners,” said VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger in a statement. “Customers will have access to OVH’s global footprint, high-touch customer support, and still retain the VMware SDDC technology innovation that they are accustomed to.<\/p>\n “We remain committed to delivering our broader cross-cloud architecture that extends our hybrid cloud strategy, enabling customers to run, manage, connect, and secure their applications across clouds and devices in a common operating environment,” added Gelsinger.<\/p>\n While vCloud Air has been going in its current guise since August 2014 – rebranded from vCloud Hybrid Service which first appeared in May 2013 – the underlying themes behind this announcement go back further. At VMworld Europe 2012, Gelsinger ‘announced the company’s move to become a heterogeneous data centre and cloud management vendor’, as Ovum analyst Roy Illsley put it<\/a>, as well as a greater shift towards SDDC. “The SDDC has long been a vision of VMware, but until now has only really focused on the compute resources in the data centre,” Illsley wrote.<\/p>\n Since then, VMware, as part of EMC, was acquired by Dell<\/a> for $67 billion – which remains one of the biggest pure tech acquisitions ever – while as Barb Darrow observes<\/a> for Fortune, the previous acquisition of Virtustream by EMC appeared to give VMware’s cloud offering another competitor from within its own ecosystem.<\/p>\n Most recently, VMware has announced partnerships with IBM and, tellingly, Amazon Web Services (AWS)<\/a>. According to figures from October last year<\/a>, 1,000 joint customers had moved their VMware environments to IBM’s cloud. VMware Cloud on AWS is expected to become available from ‘mid 2017’ onwards. As this publication pointed out<\/a> at VMworld in Las Vegas back in August, the company’s strategy was all around hybrid and becoming ‘an enabler for businesses running on other, more populous clouds.’ In other words – don’t be too surprised by this latest announcement.<\/p>\n The transaction is expected to close in Q2 2017, with financial details not disclosed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" VMware has announced it is to sell its cloud offering based on the software-driven data centre (SDDC), vCloud Air, to French cloud computing provider OVH in what was described as ‘the next step in vCloud Air’s evolution’.
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